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Tuesday, November 19, 2013

The Secret History of Hezbollah

By Tony Badran - Foundation for Defense of Democracies

Thirty years ago last
month, Hezbollah blew up the barracks of the U.S Marines and French
paratroopers stationed at the Beirut airport, killing 241 U.S. servicemen and
58 Frenchmen. It wasn’t Hezbollah’s first terrorist operation, but this attack,
the most memorable in Lebanon’s vicious and chaotic 15-year-long civil war,
marked the Party of God’s entry onto the world stage. Three decades later, thanks
to the efforts of Israeli Hezbollah expert Shimon Shapira, we now know that one
of the men responsible for the attack was an Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps
(IRGC) commander named Hossein Dehghan​—​the man Iranian president Hassan
Rouhani recently tapped to be his defense minister. In other words, Hezbollah
and the Islamic Republic of Iran have been joined at the hip from the very
beginning, even before the 1979 Iranian revolution.Of course, that’s not the
standard account of Hezbollah, the historical narrative jointly constructed and
largely agreed upon by Middle East experts, journalists, some Western and Arab
intelligence officials, and even Hezbollah figures themselves. This account
holds that Hezbollah was founded in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley in 1982 to fight, or
“resist,” the Israeli invasion of that year. On this reading, the belief​—​held
by the organization’s many critics, targets, and enemies​—​that Hezbollah is
little more than an IRGC battalion on the eastern Mediterranean is simply part
of a U.S.-Israeli disinformation campaign meant to smear a national resistance
movement fighting for the liberation of Lebanese lands. Sure, Hezbollah was
founded with some help from Iranian officials, and still receives financial
assistance from Tehran, but the organization is strictly a Lebanese affair. It
was engendered by Israel’s 1982 invasion and subsequent occupation of Lebanon. The
occupation, as one author sympathetic to the group put it, is Hezbollah’s
“raison d’être.” Even former Israeli prime
minister Ehud Barak contends that it was the Israeli occupation that gave birth
to Hezbollah. “It was our stay [in Lebanon] that established [Hezbollah],”
Israel’s most decorated soldier said in 2010. “Hezbollah got stronger not as a
result of our exit from Lebanon but as a result of our stay in Lebanon.” Perhaps
Barak was simply keen to defend his decision to withdraw Israeli troops from
Lebanon in 2000, for his account is simply not true. The big bang theory of
Hezbollah that puts the Israeli occupation at the alpha point is based not in
fact but in legend​—​it’s an Israel-centric myth that makes the Jewish state
Hezbollah’s motivation and prime mover. In reality, the story of Hezbollah’s
origins is a story about Iran, featuring the anti-shah revolutionaries active
in Lebanon in the 1970s, years before Israel’s intervention. Thus, to uncover
Hezbollah’s roots, it is necessary to mine the accounts of Iranian cadres
operating in Lebanon a decade before Israel invaded. There we find that,
contrary to the common wisdom, Hezbollah didn’t arise as a resistance movement
to the Israeli occupation. Rather, it was born from the struggle between
Iranian revolutionary factions opposed to the shah. Lebanon was a critical
front for this rivalry between Hezbollah’s Iranian progenitors and their
domestic adversaries. Accordingly, an accurate understanding of this history
gives us not only the true story of Hezbollah’s beginnings, but also an insight
into the origins of Iran’s Islamic Revolution. Those early internal conflicts
and impulses, played out in Lebanon as well as Iran, also provide a roadmap for
reading the nature of the current regime in Tehran, its motivations and
concerns, its strategies and gambits as it moves toward acquiring a nuclear
weapon and challenging the American order in the Middle East. For Iranian revolutionary
activists, Lebanon in the early to mid 1970s was valuable ground, not because
it bordered Israel, but because it was a free zone in which to pursue their
anti-shah activity. Though the Lebanese government maintained relations with
Iran, the weakness of the state presented opportunities unavailable elsewhere
in the Middle East. The autonomy of the Palestine Liberation Organization, the
most significant military outfit in Lebanon after it was pushed out of Jordan
in 1970, and the military training camps it ran in Lebanon afforded the anti-shah
opposition​—​often traveling with fake Palestinian identity papers​—​many
benefits. There they could operate and organize freely, acquire military
training and weapons, make contacts with other revolutionary organizations,
form alliances, and establish networks of support for their fight against the
Pahlavi regime. Another attraction for the
Iranians was Lebanon’s large Shiite population, especially the influential
Iranian-born cleric Musa al-Sadr, who proved helpful to many of the Iranian
oppositionists. Both Sadr’s network and the PLO’s would continue to prove
critical even after the Iranian revolution, in the ensuing power struggle
between Iran’s revolutionary factions.Of the several Iranian
groups operating in Lebanon in the 1970s, two main factions are of note. One
comprised figures from the Liberation Movement of Iran (LMI), such as Mostafa
Chamran, who served as defense minister after the fall of the shah. In Lebanon,
Chamran and the LMI worked closely with Sadr, whom LMI leaders knew from his
student days in Tehran, and who was the uncle of one of the group’s leaders in
exile. Sadr also relied on the
Palestinians for training his newly formed Amal militia. His concern wasn’t
fighting Israel but rather protecting his and the Shiite community’s interests
from other Lebanese factions with the onset of the Lebanese civil war. He and
Chamran were ambivalent about the Palestinians, and in 1976, when Sadr aligned
with Syrian president Hafez al-Assad and supported Syria’s entry into Lebanon,
the divide only widened. The PLO and its allies on the Lebanese left opposed
Syria and sharply criticized Sadr. Moreover, Palestinian attacks on Israel from
south Lebanon put Shiite villagers in the face of Israeli retaliation, a danger
that worried both Sadr and Chamran. It wasn’t long, then, before Amal came into
conflict with the same Palestinian factions that had trained Sadr’s men. In contrast, the other main
faction of Iranian revolutionaries operating in Lebanon maintained close
relations with the PLO and mistrusted Sadr and the LMI. This faction was made
up of devotees of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, and after the Iranian revolution
became part of the Islamic Republic party. Many of them also became top
commanders in the IRGC and the Office of Liberation Movements (OLM), charged
with establishing contacts with and supporting revolutionary movements abroad. In
effect, the OLM was the precursor of the Quds Force, the overseas operations
arm of the IRGC. It was set up under the supervision of Ayatollah Hossein Ali
Montazeri, a close associate of Khomeini and his heir apparent, and was headed
by his son, Hojjatoleslam Mohammad Montazeri. Others associated with the
Khomeinist faction working in Lebanon included Jalaleddin Farsi, a close
associate of Montazeri who was the party’s candidate in Iran’s first
presidential election after the revolution, and Hojjatoleslam Ali Akbar
Mohtashami, a student of Khomeini who later became ambassador to Syria and
would play a critical role in the emergence of Hezbollah. Another important
figure in this camp who played a key role in forming Hezbollah was Mohammad
Saleh Hosseini, a founding member of the IRGC. Hosseini appears
prominently in the primary sources, and yet he has been entirely overlooked in
the scholarly literature on Hezbollah. Born to an Iranian family in 1942,
Hosseini grew up in Najaf, Iraq, where he became involved in, and got arrested
for, Islamic activism, and also established close relations with Iraqi-based
officials from Yasser Arafat’s Fatah, the dominant party in the PLO. After the
1968 Baathist coup in Iraq, Hosseini was forced to flee to Lebanon, where, in
late 1970, he was given shelter by Musa al-Sadr and became the principal of one
of Sadr’s schools, where, thanks to his contacts with Fatah, he helped train
the school’s Shiite youths. Even after he was dismissed
from the school, Hosseini and the Khomeinists established connections with
young Shiite militants associated with Fatah who yet balked at the Palestinian
group’s secular, indeed leftist, outlook. From the Khomeinists’ perspective,
these young fighters were ripe for recruitment, and part of Hosseini’s role was
to ensure that the Shiites he cultivated were, unlike those in Sadr’s
organization, pro-Khomeini. Those who passed inspection would come to form the
nucleus of Hezbollah. The most famous of them was Imad Mughniyeh, who would
become the group’s military commander and mastermind of many of Hezbollah’s
most notorious operations. By the time of the Marine barracks bombing in 1983,
Mughniyeh was already a well-known Iranian asset who, along with other
like-minded Shiites, had been working closely with future senior IRGC
commanders since the mid-1970s.There were tensions between
the two Iranian camps in Lebanon, and the friction between the Khomeinists and
the Sadrists foreshadowed the divisions among the anti-shah activists that
would be played out on the streets of Tehran after the revolution. One of the
key debates among the Khomeinists was whether to use Sadr’s Amal militia as the
vehicle for political and military action in Lebanon. The chief problem with
that idea was that Khomeini and Sadr were rivals. Or at least that’s how
Khomeini and his followers saw Sadr, and perhaps for good reason. The Iranian-born
Sadr, who’d won a huge following in Lebanon, had established such close ties
with senior LMI leaders that he might have leveraged for influence inside
Iran. It’s unclear whether Sadr
was as ambitious as Khomeini, or as jealous of another cleric’s reputation. Sadr
never endorsed Khomeini’s status as marja’, or Shiite religious
authority. It’s worth noting that it was the religious authority of the cleric
that would undergird the theory, “guardianship of the jurist” (velayat-e
faqih), according to which Khomeini would justify his theocratic rule when
he eventually took power. But Sadr didn’t live to see it.In August 1978, Sadr
disappeared during a trip to Libya. Montazeri and his faction maintained a
close relationship with the Libyans, sponsors of the PLO, and Sadr’s associates
in Lebanon would eventually come to accuse the Montazeri camp of complicity in
Sadr’s presumed death. It’s hardly surprising that Khomeini failed to exert any
serious efforts to discover the missing cleric’s fate. He valued the alliance
with Libya and the PLO​—​and the disposal of a potential challenger was hardly
inconvenient.Shortly after Sadr’s
disappearance, the countdown to the revolution picked up its pace. The shah
departed in January 1979, and Khomeini returned to Iran a few weeks later in
triumph. The Islamic Republic party was soon formed, bringing together
Khomeini’s devotees and other radical clergy who sought an Islamic republic. They
began calling themselves Hezbollah. This was to distinguish themselves from
their domestic rivals, the LMI and allied factions, whom they referred to as
the “liberals,” and who they feared would sabotage the revolution. Those so-called liberals
were not the same as those in the current regime who are often referred to as
“moderates.” Today’s “moderates,” or pragmatists, like former president Akbar
Hashemi Rafsanjani, were part of the IRP. Their domestic rivals, the liberals,
were typically sidelined, exiled, or liquidated in a struggle over the
direction of the revolution.By the summer of 1981, the
Islamic Republic party finally rolled up its rivals and took sole control of
the government, which it called “the Hezbollahi government.” LMI’s most
influential figures met the fate of their friend Musa al-Sadr. Mostafa Chamran,
for instance, was killed in mysterious circumstances in June 1981 during the
war with Iraq. But the Khomeinists also
absorbed significant losses. Mohammad Montazeri was killed in a blast that
targeted the IRP headquarters in Tehran in June 1981. Mohammad Saleh Hosseini,
who under Khomeini became a senior IRGC official responsible for external
relations, had been assassinated in Beirut two months previously. His death had
little effect on Iranian policy inside of Lebanon since the assets that he and
top IRGC leadership had been cultivating since the mid-70s were now being
consolidated. Moreover, there were plenty
of colleagues to pick up where Montazeri and Hosseini had left off. For
instance, in 1981 Ali Akbar Mohtashami summoned Mughniyeh and Hezbollah’s
future secretary general, Abbas Musawi, to Iran for initial discussions about
providing training for Hezbollah. As the newly appointed ambassador to
Damascus, Mohtashami was well placed to facilitate the arrival of IRGC troops. And
in 1982, that Iranian delegation landed in the Bekaa Valley, led by current
Iranian defense minister Hossein Dehghan. In the conventional
narrative of Hezbollah’s origins, it is the arrival of this contingent, the
work it did there, and the men it trained that is typically said to signal the
organization’s birth. However, by the time Dehghan, Mohtashami, and Mughniyeh
engineered the October 1983 attack that killed 241 American servicemen, the
Khomeinists had already been active in Lebanon for over a decade. They wanted
their own Shiite organization operating in Lebanon. The PLO was never going to
be an entirely trustworthy asset, and Amal, as long as Sadr was alive, was an
adversary, and even after his death would never prove pliant enough. As Khomeini and his
followers established their control over the revolution, here was an
opportunity to do the same in the place where it had, arguably, first taken
shape. And now it was all coming full circle as Iran’s triumphant Islamic
Republicans, Hezbollah, spawned their namesake in Lebanon. Three decades later,
Hezbollah remains on top in both Iran and Lebanon.

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at:
http://defenddemocracy.org/media-hit/the-secret-history-of-hezbollah/#sthash.r86DXhAU.dpuf